Brent Atkins Outlines Building Your Brand

<p>Brent Atkins, Senior Vice President Business Development at Progyny, shares the business development lessons he’s learned over the years that have defined his career. Learn about the one GrowBIG training that changed how Brent thought about how he communicates and builds relationships with clients, the skill that all serious business development professionals have to master to be effective, and why you can’t win at business by simply copying what works for other people.</p> <p> </p> <p>Mo asks Brent Atkins: Tell me about the time  you realized that business development was awesome.</p> <ul> <li>Brent learned early on the need for business development because he has done sales throughout his career. The one thing he realized from all his different work experiences was that he loved interacting with people and connecting with them. He understood that there was far more depth to sales than just telling someone your story.</li> <li>He had a desire to learn more and be more successful in his relationships in business and very quickly realized that there is a huge difference between talking to someone and listening to someone.</li> <li>Through the course of interacting with one of Brent’s early bosses, he learned he needed to be prepared for the questions he was going to ask Brent, but also that he needed answers to the questions from their perspective in order to serve them better. He needed to have a dialogue with the customer because all his knowledge about what he was selling was only one small piece of the overall business development process.</li> <li>The transition from talking to listening is a key mindset shift that all business development professionals need to learn.</li> <li>Brent now leads a team of many younger salespeople and helps them better understand the business development process. The first step is to help them want to learn more about business development, because without that desire, nothing else sticks.</li> <li>When setting meetings, Brent teaches people to set an objective for the meeting